


(Un)Truths

by Leni



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Post: s06e04 Flooded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-22
Updated: 2012-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 22:57:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leni/pseuds/Leni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during that BtVS6/AtS3 off-screen meeting. I guess you can even place it as an outtake from <a>Off The Beaten Path</a>. References to IWRY.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(Un)Truths

“I wish I could help you forget,” Angel said, tightening his arms around her. Except for the initial greetings and a couple comments on Californian weather, their meeting had passed in silence. They’d walked to a graveyard – where else would they go in a strange town? They’d sat against a tombstone, the hard granite a sense-memory of easier times. They’d held each other, bodies sharing where words couldn’t tread. “To think of you in a hell dimension,” he spat. “I can’t….” He felt her tense, and so he stopped. “I’m sorry. I’m not making things better.”

Slowly, Buffy relaxed back into him. “Would it help? Forgetting,” she said, her voice wondering. “Willow suggested something similar. But… even if you wipe the memories, don’t the impressions stay there? I remember when Dracula put me under a thrall – don’t! It was long ago. I _knew_ it was wrong. Body and mind didn’t protest, but everything else was screaming to get away.”

Angel couldn’t help brushing his fingers against her hair-covered scar. It was an absurd move; he couldn’t claim what was no longer offered to him. Whether that overgrown bat had bitten her or not, he’d been long gone by then. But, damn it, some things he expected to remain _his_. When he’d lost everything else, a fading scar didn’t seem like much to ask for. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“It would.” Buffy tilted her head, a conscious or unconscious motion, Angel didn’t care to ask as he bent his head to kiss the spot. “It doesn’t matter whether I forget. I know that, deep down, I would remember I was… elsewhere.”

He froze. “Would you?” Then he shook his head at his own foolishness. “Not if it never happened.”

Buffy straightened a little, turning her head with a wrinkle in her forehead that was an obvious question as to why his voice had suddenly turned so bitter. “I guess not,” she said slowly. “But if it never happened, we wouldn’t be here at all, would we?”

“No.” One hand tightened at her waist; the other, at her shoulder. “It wouldn’t be the same at all.” His voice had roughened, he knew, but Angel couldn’t stop that. Instead he focused on not closing his eyes and remember the last time he’d held her (the last time before Joyce, but he couldn’t in good conscience group the embrace they’d shared at her mother’s grave with all their other moments together.) “Would you do it?” he finally asked, afraid that she’d say yes. Terrified that she’d say no.

Buffy chuckled. “Angel. Willow brought me back _from the dead_. If she could have turned back time instead, don’t you think she’d have done that?”

“Right.” Except that no, it wasn’t right. It hadn’t been right since…. “But if someone offered, would you accept?” It wasn't fair of him to ask when she lacked pivotal information, when the Oracles were no more even if he and Buffy were to voluntarily seek out that choice. But once that same choice had been imposed on him, on them both, and although Angel had never thought he'd be in the position to ask, now the question escaped him, something deep inside begging for absolution of an act that, in reality, had never affected her.

She rested her head against his collarbone, looking up at the stars above. Angel recognized that posture, from so many nights when she’d taken her time to answer a complicated question. Her fingers even reached to stroke the back of his hand, completing the illusion of her high school years. Her answer brought him back to the present, though. “I died for Dawn. I’d do it again, and again, and again…. But if I’d be promised enough time to make things different; I don’t know, get some of our blood into a bag and throw that into the portal, come down from that tower still alive….” Her hand stayed its movement, and it’d barely started to draw away when Angel caught it.

“Would you?” he insisted, and hoped she’d never understand why he needed to know.

Buffy closed her eyelids tight. “If I never had to go to… that place. If I never had to experience it.” She let out a sigh, and Angel almost thought it was a wistful one. “Then yes," - the words dropped into a whisper - "I’d accept.”

Angel had rarely been so glad that he didn’t need to breathe. But his relief needed some physical expression, so he tightened the hold on her hand and was about to kiss her crown when she turned in his arms and searched his gaze. “Can someone do that, Angel?”

It was his turn to close his eyes, gather his thoughts; but he forced himself not to. If Buffy sensed any doubt, she wouldn't understand its source. “No.” _Not anymore_.

Even if it wasn’t a lie, it still felt like he was disappointing her all over again.

 

The End  
12/04/10


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